The hardest-hit provinces are reporting this data, even if Ottawa won’t deign to collect it. Health Minister Patty Hajdu’s talking points, posted online, even note that “in order to have an effective response to the ever-changing crisis, a strong understanding and evidence-base is required to make informed and timely decisions.” The talking points laud their own outdated, underreported, and inconsistent work. The Trudeau government promised repeatedly to improve national overdose reporting.
Quebec and British Columbia report non-opioid overdose deaths, but other provinces do not. Manitoba still hasn’t supplied its data from the last quarter of 2020. That data, however, only stretches from January 2016 to December 2020: The agency won’t release data from the first quarter of 2021 until the end of September. But Canada’s indifference to the opioid epidemic means we have a criminally incomplete picture of it.Īccording to the Public Health Agency of Canada 21,174 people have died from opiods. In order to understand an epidemic, you must be able to measure it-a lesson we’ve learned all too well recently, glued to our computers and televisions awaiting updated COVID-19 data. “ Decriminalization is not popular when you poll it, ” Philpott told me, after she and her colleague were pushed out of the Liberal Party caucus. His former health minister and attorney general, Jane Philpott and Jody Wilson-Raybould, advocated for decriminalization around the cabinet table and got a blunt response. In a roundabout answer the Liberal leader said: No.Įven if those policies would seem unthinkable just years ago, they are measures that experts say need to happen for every other harm reduction tactic to be fully efficient, to bring drug users out of the shadows and into society, and to end the costly and ineffective war on drugs.īut Trudeau has refused to go down that road. On Tuesday, International Overdose Awareness Day, Trudeau was asked by reporter David Akin whether he would follow expert advice and take the first step of decriminalizing opioids for personal use and regulate the supply of the deadly drug. The indifference can only be explained by political expediency.Ĭanada’s opposition leaders, to their credit, are at least rowing in the right direction. Worse yet, they find themselves largely unchallenged on it. At every turn, his Liberal government has offered half-measures. It’s likely 2021 will be the deadliest year on record-beating last year’s record, which in turn beat 2018’s record high, which surpassed 2017’s horrifying death toll.Īnd it’s time we stop pretending Justin Trudeau is taking this crisis seriously. Our life expectancy has stalled due to the scores of lives, particularly young ones, lost to the epidemic. We’ve lost more people to this drug crisis than to COVID-19. More than 23,000 people have died in this country from drug overdose and drug poisoning in just the last five years.
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